Gricault, or the Absence of Women

Author(s): Linda Nochlin

Reviewed work(s):
Source: October, Vol. 68 (Spring, 1994), pp. 45-59
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778696 .
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 Gericault, or the
Absence of Women

LINDA NOCHLIN

It was Charles Clement who said it, in the context of a discussion of the
young woman observer in Gericault's lithograph TheParalyticWoman:"The young
girl's form is ravishing; she is practically an exception in the work of the master.
Gtricaulthas, so to speak,neverrepresented women."l
Indeed, women are relatively rare in Gericault's admittedly truncated pro-
duction. In this, it is unlike David's oeuvre,in which gender opposition plays a
central role in the creation of meaning; nor does it resemble that of his slightly
younger contemporary, Delacroix, where woman, allegorized as Liberty, repre-
sents the very aspiration-the unified and exalted project-of the variegated
male figures following behind her in the artist's painting of 1830. It is hard to
think of women or a place for women in G6ricault's work, and when we do, we
come up with models of abjection and marginalization: a child, a cripple, two
madwomen, a corpse-and perhaps a portrait or two.2
Even in cases where the representation of woman might originally have
figured, or-even more-occupied a central place in the signifying structure of a
painting, it is ultimately omitted. I take as my major example Gericault's most ambi-
tious painting, TheRaft of the Medusa,which bears witness to this striking occlusion
of the feminine in the earliest stages of Gericault's development of his subject.
In a preliminary study for a different moment in the tragedy-the Sceneof
Mutiny-a family group occupies the center stage and was obviously of considerable
importance to the intentions of the artist, as he carefully experimented with the
pose and expression of this woman-centered group in at least two detailed drawings.
But this emotionally charged group, consisting of a dying or exhausted mother, a
meditative father, and a heroically nude child, quickly disappears; it is absent
from the most finished preliminary study for the mutiny incident, certainly no

1. Charles Clement, Gricault: EtudeBiographiqueet critique,intro. Lorenz Eitner (Paris: Laget, 1973;
reprint of definitive edition of 1879), pp. 217-18 (emphasis added).
2. The latest candidate for the (much contested) representation of Gericault's lover, his aunt,
Alexandrine Modeste Caruel, may provide an addition to the rare corpus of female portraits by the
master. The work, Portraitof a YoungWoman,of circa 1816, which was published in the Sotheby's New
Yorkcatalog from October 17, 1991, has been partially attributed to Gericault by Lorenz Eitner.

OCTOBER68, Spring1994, pp. 45-59. ? 1994 Linda Nochlin.

Below: The Raft of the Medusa. Salon of 1819.

Opposite:Scene of Mutiny.
Gericault, or the Absence of Women 47

longer present in the next stage of the development of the subject, the Sceneof
Cannibalism,and never to appear again in any of the sketches or the final version.
In the completed Raft, the family group has been replaced by the single-sex
"father-son" dyad, a paternal topos replete with pathetic evocations of the
Ugolino legend. Age difference has been substituted for the original gender
opposition; or rather, one might say that the father-son couple now takes over the
emotionally charged position previously occupied by mother-child-father-the
family triad-in an earlier stage of conception.
One might insist that Gericault altered his cast of characters in the interests
of accuracy: that he was merely following the all-male scenario offered him by the
classical account of the shipwreck offered by the survivors Savigny and Correard.
But these witnesses, in their hair-raising, highly detailed account of the fate of the
raft-their Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816... Comprising an Account of the
Shipwreckof the Medusa, a narrative that includes the events preceding, following,
and synchronous with that tragedy--did not, in fact, stipulate an all-male cast of
characters, for they included, with considerable prominence, a woman; yet, neither,
on the other hand, did their story mention a family group among the raft's
shipwrecked survivors.3 G6ricault is usually held to have stuck closely to this

3. Savigny and Corr6ard, Narrative of a Voyageto Senegalin 1816 ... Comprisingan Account of the
Shipwreckof the Medusa (London: Henry Coburn, 1818, 2nd edition). This English translation of the
Naufragede lafregatela Midusefaisant partie de l'expeditiondu Senegalen 1816... (Paris: Hocquet, 1817) is
extremely accurate.
48 OCTOBER

best-selling description of the raft's vicissitudes: to have examined the drawing of

the raft that served as frontispiece of the French edition; to have followed the
account's information about the presence of blacks among the survivors; to have
noted the presence of water casks on the deck; and, of course, apart from his
printed source, to have made a miniature mock-up of the raft which he floated on
the waves of the Atlantic and to have studied corpses in his studio in order to
achieve a greater degree of horrific accuracy. The Raft, from start to finish, is
indeed marked throughout by the intensity of its "effects of the real."
On the other hand, Gericault, like most artists, even those held to be most
"accurate"in reporting the facts of an event, was at once highlyselectivein terms of
exactly which episode in the account to choose for his final version and in his
choice of a cast of characters, at the same time that he was quite flexiblein termsof
temporality,putting together fragments of reality that did not necessarily coexist in
his textual source. This is, after all, a painting and not a film-although the
Savigny and Correard story could provide the basis of a script both melodramatic
and violent.
Let us consider, in a greater detail, both the presenceof the family group in
the early drawing and the absenceof women in the final version in relation to the
published account. It seems to me that the family group, explicitly missing from
the textual source, was a topos of G6ricault's invention at an early stage of his
construction of the composition, a conventional enough figure of contrast, stand-
ing for the pathos of "normalcy" isolated in the midst of hellish brutality and
referring back to prototypes in countless traditional plague scenes and battle
paintings. Gericault must have quickly realized that such a conventional represen-
tation, with no factual support from his well-known text, had no place in his
picture and removed it.4
Yet a woman-not a family group-played a considerable part in the Savigny
narrative. This woman first appears as half of a loving couple, who are thrown
overboard by drunken mutineers early in the ordeal. The account of her rescue
figures heavily in Savigny's text. It seems that after the rescue she tried to reward
Correard with a little snuff, her last possession. "A more affecting scene, which it
is impossible for us to describe, is the joy this unfortunate couple displayed when
they had sufficiently recovered their senses to see that they were saved," declare
the authors.5 And unlike most of those on the raft, this woman is given a full
biography: she turns out to be, in Savigny's pro-Napoleonic, anti-Restoration
construction, a kind of middle-aged Marianne, or Republican Mother Courage

4. Both women and a family were present on the frigate Medusaand escaped to the African shore
in boats. These included the heartless and snobbish daughters of the captain and the famille nombreuse
of one M. Picard, the greffier (clerk of court) of Senegal. All in all there were 18 women and 8 chil-
dren on the frigate. The raft itself, after the shipwreck, set out originally with 147 or 150 aboard: 120
soldiers, including officers; 29 men, sailors and passengers; and one woman.
5. Savigny and Correard, Narrativeof a Voyage,p. 90.
Gricault, or theAbsenceof Women 49

who had served as a sutler-a vivandiere-during the campaigns in Italy. She

declared, Savigny writes, "that she had never quitted our armies. 'Therefore,' said
she, 'preserve my life, you see that I am a useful woman.... I also have braved
death on the field of battle to carry assistance to our brave men.'"6 True, she was
not present at the end of the journey, having been removed from the raft after
terrible suffering, but Savigny gives her a stirring eulogy, heavy with political and
nationalist overtones: "This French woman, to whom soldiers and Frenchmen
gave the sea for a tomb, had partaken for twenty years in the glorious trials of our
armies; for twenty years she had afforded to the brave on the field of battle, either
the assistance which they needed, or soothing consolations."7
Thus there was most definitely a vividly characterized and even heroic
woman on board the raft, available to Gericault's imaginative reconstruction of
the narrative if he had wished to include her. On the other hand, while black
soldiers are discussed-not very positively, to be sure-in accounts of the earlier
portion of the raft's vicissitudes, there is no detailed description of black survivors
at the end of the ordeal, much less any stipulation that it was a black who waved
the white rag to signal to the distant ship from the top of the barrel.
The decision as to which sections of Savigny and Correard's account
Gericault chose to illustrate and which details and players he included in his
scenario is crucial to our reading of the work. The elimination of the single
woman from the cast of characters therefore constitutes a significant choice
within Gericault's larger patterns of decision, as does the inclusion of black males.
Indeed, within the single-sex structure of oppositions creating meaning and
expressive tension in the Raft, racial difference plays a major role, despite the fact
that only a single black seems to have survived to the end of the voyage, and that
there is no documentary evidence whatever to indicate that a black man was at
the pinnacle of those sighting the rescue ship.8 Racial difference nevertheless
constitutes an important element in the construction of meaning in the Raft;like
age difference, it takes the place so often inscribed by gender in major paintings
by other artists.
To put it another way, the Raft as we know it, in its urgently unified yet inter-
estingly variegated straining after the beyond, the unattainable, is premised,
indeed depends, upon an all-male cast of characters. Homosociality-or even
homoeroticism-is the conscious as well as the unconscious underpinning of the
almost unbearable buildup of visual and psychic tension here. There is no room,
no place for women in this carefully orchestrated symphony of masculine desire,
embodied in a crescendo of muscular urgency in which only the effectively dis-
persed corpses, pitiful, a little feminized, like rest notes in a musical composition,

6. Ibid., p. 93.
7. Ibid., p. 119. There is a great deal more in this vein.
8. One 'Jean Charles, black Soldier" is noted in the list of fifteen who were "Alivewhen we were
saved." He is listed as "Dead"under the heading of "Notice of their subsequent fate." Ibid., p. 145.
50 OCTOBER

Le factionnairesuissedu Louvre.

provide a measure of relief. One might even go so far as to say that the object of
desire hovering so tantalizingly on the horizon is the ever (in Lacanian terms)
absent phallus: that which is missing and appears, delusionally, in the unattain-
able distance.
This mounting toward nothingness, toward the perpetually doomed and
frustrated chase after the missing phallus, is as far from the psychic (and formal)
structure of Davidian balance as it is from that of Delacroixian allegory, in both of
which women must be presentto figure the opposingterm,the closureof the trope,as it
were. G6ricault's figuration remains-painfully, dramatically, romantically-
open.9 Indeed one might go further and say that the agonized figuration of desire
in G6ricault's Raft marks the onset of a certain recognizable structure of the
romantic itself in visual representation.
Still another strategyof displacement of the feminine in Gericault'sproduction
is constituted by the artist's frequent positioning of the male as victim. In his vari-
ous military paintings and drawings, like the WoundedCurassieror WoundedSoldiers
in a Cart,men are usually relegated to this time-honored feminine position. Or, to
put it another way, one might say that in the whole series of memorable works
dealing with wounded soldiers and veterans of the Napoleonic Wars, masculine

9. See an unpublished manuscript by Norman Bryson, "Gericault and Masculinity": "However

much the markers of the masculine proliferate, what subtends that proliferation is lack within the
position of the masculine and lack at its very centre" (p. 18). I am grateful to Professor Bryson for
making his important insights available to me.
Gericault,or theAbsenceof Women 51

vulnerability functions as a sign of the feminine. But even more provocatively, the
wounded man-as in Le factionnaire suisse au Louvre,a lithograph of 1819-may
covertly suggest castrationrather than mere victimization.
One might maintain, of course, that femininity and castration are mirror
images of each other, interchangeable within any given system of representation.
And castration imagery, in the form of executions and decapitations, haunts the
Gericauldian imaginary, from the time of the artist's days in Italy to those of his
voyage to England, and in between, in his preparatory studies for the Raft. These
themes can be seen in such works as Executionin Italy and Gibbet.But the series of
uncanny still lifes of DecapitatedHeads constitute the ultimate post-Revolutionary
castration topos in Gericault's work. But even more important, the meaning they
construct, read in the context of the historical situation and G6ricault's position
within it, is political as well as sexual, or, more accurately, political and sexual at
the same time.
To summarize my argument so far: I would say that despite the nonpresence
of women in G6ricault's oeuvre,the signs of femininity and the feminine-in the
form of the castrated (or otherwise marginalized or disempowered male body)
abound in his work. It is simply that these signs of the feminine have been
detached from the representationof the actual bodiesof women.To paraphrase the title
of a recent, important book by cultural critic Tania Modleski, what we have here is
"femininity without women."10
Nor are these the only strategies of substitution. Despite the dangers of
parlor Freudianism, I must make a few observations about the central place
occupied by the horse in Gericault's production of the sensual body, a place
more usually occupied by the human female. The equine body is lovingly
explored from front to rear throughout his career, from forelock to fetlock, as
it were. Can a horse be the object of the fully desiring gaze? If so, the animal
portrayed in Head of a WhiteHorse (Paris, Louvre) certainly is that object: soft-
muzzled, hot-blooded, seductively coiffed. The object of desire may have four
legs and a tail, and, indeed, be the object of a different kind of desire, but the
analogue to a certain kind of erotica makes itself felt in terms of the sheer invest-
ment of libidinal energy in these and many other horse images. The animal
sensuality at play certainly raises the excitement level of these pictures from the
banality of the sporting print to something more spine-tingling.
Yet, of course, actual women arerepresented in GCricault'soeuvre,representa-
tions that, if marginalized in every sense of the word-constituted by female
subjects who are immature, crippled, mad, or black-are nevertheless profoundly
engaging and significant: marginal for good reason. Or, to put it another way, the
marginality of women is so conspicuous in G6ricault'svisual production that it may
be said to constitute a central issue in the critical discourse surrounding his work.

10. See Tania Modleski, Feminismwithout Women:Cultureand Criticismin a "Postfeminist"

Age (New
York and London: Routledge, 1991).
Left:Horses' Rumps and One Head.

Right:Head of a White Horse.

Portait of Louise Vernet as a Child.

Gericault, or the Absence of Women 53

To explain this we need, first of all, to consider the question of origins. If

the early work features the customary male academies,it is nevertheless clear that
the young artist can confront the female nude with a certain amount of relish
when required to do so. A comparison of his version of OenoneRefusing to Heal
Paris, a Prix de Rome drawing now in Rouen, with the prize-winning painting of
the subject byJ. B. A. Thomas reveals a much lustier, more assertive nude heroine
in Gericault's sketch, rather than the bland, draped one in Thomas's offering.
But, more to the point, in his mature work, if Gericault represents a female
child, as in the Portrait of Louise Vernetas a Child in the Louvre, rather than a grown
woman, it is hardly the conventional image of childish innocence-a good little
girl-that confronts the bemused viewer. Indeed, to borrow the immortal words
of Mae West, "goodness has nothing to do with it." This is a little girl with a differ-
ence: an unforgettable, almost monstrous Lolita, comparable only with Gustave
Courbet's rather similar though much later Portraitof Beatrice Bouvetof 1864. The
same coy, primitivizing quality is present in both, perhaps attributable to the
impress of popular imagery. In Gericault's portrait, the effect of uncanniness is
heightened by a sort of gigantism: the swollen child overwhelms the surrounding,
storm-tossed space, and uneasily masters the equally over-scaled cat on her knee.
Fetishization of the body of the female child and her accoutrements has a
small but significant place in nineteenth-century art history, often supplemented
by the presence of an accompanying animal. There are perverse implications in
the furry toy lamb Beatrice Bouvet clutches in Courbet's portrait, but it is the cat
that is generally figured as the sinister portent of potential evil in child portraiture,
especially when juxtaposed with children's "natural"innocence, as it is in Goya's
Portraitof Don Manuel Osorio,or, more explicitly, if unconsciously, I imagine, in the
case of the young girl in Eakins's YoungGirl with a Cat, as an evocation of latent
feminine sexuality. In Gericault's Portraitof Louise Vernet,the roguish or seductive
glance, the lifted skirt, and the falling shoulder of the dress seem like a foreshad-
owing of that odd sense of constraint, that hypersophisticated primitivism, and
above all, that all-pervading atmosphere of the uncanny associated with Balthus's
renditions of the jeune-or petite-fille in the twentieth century. How different this
is from the virginal delicacy and middle-distance remoteness of Gericault's more
conventional portrait of Louise Bro, a mature woman and, one would have
thought, more suitable for close-up delectation.
Gericault's construction of the figure of the mad woman is in many ways as
unconventional as his representation of the female child, both in its subtle
mapping of the human geography of disarrayand, at the same time, in the relative
restraint of its representation of "monomanias," as they were then called. Despite,
or perhaps because of, Gericault's strict adherence to his friend, the psychiatrist,
Georget's project in cataloguing recognizable types of madness, it is remarkable
that the artist avoided those stigmata of grotesquery or sexual excess so often
inscribed on the figure of the mentally ill woman,and indeed seen as identical with
Monomaniaof Envy. Head of a BlackWoman.

female insanity.ll Indeed, G6ricault's Monomaniaof Gamblingand his Monomaniaof

Envy are remarkably gender-neutral: these are not represented as explicitly sex-
related mental diseases like "hysteria"or "nymphomania," the female afflictions
typically staged-and photographed-by Charcot later in the century.12
Gericault's is a very different kind of representation of madness in the
feminine than that set forth at the end of the century by Andre Brouillet in his
histrionic Charcotat the Salpetriere,which is marked by a beguilingly sexualized
inscription of that specifically female symptom, hysteria. Indeed, one might say
that difference is suppressed in Gericault's series: there is more that unites the
male and female exemplars-wandering, unfocused gaze, red-rimmed eyes, a
general sense of dislocation and inner tension-than anything that distinguishes
Gericault's male from his female maniacs.
Equally interesting from the perspective of muting the representation of
sexual difference is Gericault's sympathetic Head of a Black Woman,where the
artist has avoided including the "natural"or "primitive"woman's exposed breasts
as part of her portrait, unlike Delacroix in his Aspasie, the Moorish Womanand
several other artists of the period, including, I might add, a woman artist, Marie
Guillemine Benoist, who depicted the elegant black woman in her 1800 Portraitof

11. For a different and far more critical interpretation of G6ricault's portraits of the insane, see
Albert Boime, "PortrayingMonomaniacs to Service the Alienist's Monomania: Gericault and Georget,"
OxfordArtJournal,vol. 14, n. 1, 1991, pp. 79-91.
12. SeeJane Kromm, "Marianneand the Madwomen," ArtJournal46 (Winter 1987), pp. 299-304.
Gericault,or theAbsenceof Women 55

The ParalyticWoman.

a Negresswith a bare bosom.13 And certainly, as Clement points out, Gericault

intended several women to figure in the great Slave Tradepainting he planned:
Cl1ment makes specific mention of a "young woman who hides her face with both
her hands" to the right, a figure that greatly adds to the poignancy of the scene by
suggesting the terrible rupture of family life and intimate feeling wrought by the
trade in human beings, a theme carried out more directly by the central group.14
Equally responsive to the depredations of oppression embodied in the
feminine persona, and again a representation of personal suffering that inscribes
a larger social malaise, is his lithograph, part of a series of English prints of 1821,
The Paralytic Woman.15How does one go about interpreting this painful yet rela-
tively opaque vignette of back-street misery? It does not tell its story clearly.
Clement was drawn to the work and describes the daintiness of the younger
woman onlooker and the contrasting bestiality of the chair-puller-attendant in
considerable detail. He also contrasts the poverty of the bricolaged barrow of the
paralyzed woman with the richness of the coach in the background.16 Yet it is
also possible, as I believe Lorenz Eitner has suggested, that the dimly adum-

13. Yale graduate student Beth Handler has, however, a very different and more critical reading of
Gericault's representation of blacks in her unpublished seminar report on "Blacksand TheRaft of the
Medusa"for a seminar on "The Body in the Nineteenth Century,"Fall 1991.
14. Clement, Gericault,p. 218.
15. It would seem to me that this print, like others of this series, owes a good deal to popular prints
of the period, and specifically to English ones.
16. Clement, Gericault,pp. 217-18.
56 OCTOBER

brated vehicle to the right is a splendid funeral coach, decorated with a coat of
arms, suggesting the impending doom of the victim in the foreground, as well as
offering a meaningful contrast to her state of impoverishment. The paper tacked
up on the wall above her seems to be an advertisement "For all sickness and
the . . ." although it is tantalizingly unclear like the meaning of the piece as a
whole.17 I, myself, would find a gender-specific subtext at work here. General
paresis or general paralysis, the ultimate stage of syphilitic infection, was viewed,
in the eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth, as the natural punishment of
sexual infraction and was represented in Hogarth's well-known series of engravings
The Harlot's Progress(1732) as the final stage of her ironically titled "progress."
Could Gericault, thinking back to Hogarth, be representing a prostitute fallen on
evil days? Would this account for the exaggerated reaction of the younger
woman? Does this implicate the bestiality of the male assistant? Is the barred
structure in the background a graveyard?I would think so, partly because it is so
like the graveyard in the background of one version of Rossetti's Found, which
also, though much later, figures an urban, specifically London setting and a
fallen woman. One can also speculate, in contemplating this pictorial meditation
on poverty, misery, social inequity, and the modern city of London, that
Gericault must have read Blake's most apposite Song of Experience,which ends:
"But Most thro' midnight streets I hear/ How the youthful Harlot's curse/ Blasts
the new born Infant's tear,/ And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse."18
Though not an exact equivalent, Blake's lines are, like Gericault's print, a potent
evocation of the dark side of urban modernity, using figures of commodification,
death, and prostitution to make their point.
Clement expresses regret at one point about his hero's lack of appreciation
of the more refined type of feminine beauty, asserting: "Itdoes not seem that the
audacious and knowledgeable painter understood feminine beauty in its delicate
and distinguished aspect." Nevertheless, Clement was well aware of the extraordi-
nary quality of the group of erotic drawings that he then went on to discuss,
prefacing his comments with a brief anecdote illustrating Gericault's lusty-even
coarse-appetites where women were concerned. "He himself said, 'I begin a
woman and it becomes a lion,"' and even more revealingly, "And also, very insinu-
atingly, slapping one of his friends on the back, 'We two X__, we like big
a s.'"19This anecdote reveals Gericault's directness in sexual matters but, at the
same time, the intense privateness of the expression of such feelings. For draw-
ings like Nymph and Satyr or Couple Embracing were obviously intended for private

17. Michael Fried has suggested that the missing words on the poster are "evil eye," making the
complete message "Forall sickness and the evil eye." I would agree with this part of his interpretation,
but not with the broader continuation of it in which he suggests that this is in fact a representation
focused on seeing and looking. Michael Fried, "Le romantisme de Gericault," presented at the
Gericault colloquium at the Louvre, Paris, November 1991.
18. William Blake, Poetryand Prose,ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Nonesuch Press, 1927), p.76.
19. Clement, G&ricault,p. 218.
 or theAbsenceof Women
G&ricault, 57

M0700?l
,- 2T 3*NNymph
_-
and Satyr.

i!i '.i -' ",

r'i

pleasure and restricted consumption-for sharing with a few friends, perhaps:

they obviously were not meant as studies for vast Salon productions or public
exhibition. There are few graphic equivalents of Gericault's vividly articulated
agons of sexual engagement. There is nothing coy or cozy, nothing vulgar, and no
formal pyrotechnics-I'm thinking of Picasso's erotica specifically in making this
exclusion-about these wash drawings: this is, if it is possible to say so, real sex.
What is surprising in works such as TheEmbraceis the figuration of women as sexual
beings, active participants in the contest of passion, not merely passive objects of
the gaze-poor little rich girls of the harem or poor little poor girls of the studio.
These women-mythic, for the most part, it is true, and creatures of fantasy-are
strong and active, not passive victims. The male figures, interestingly enough,
given Gericault's involvement with the horse, are often partly or wholly-as in the
Leda and the Swan-animal. Again, to borrow the words of Clement: "He needed
large and robust forms, emphatic and violent movements, energized expressions:
always drama and passion with that hint of ardor, sensuality, even brutality, that
one finds in his WomenRapedbyCentaurs,in the bacchantes of his Silenus."20
Clement regrets, or is at least "astonished by this disposition"-all the more
astonished in that Gericault has indicated, "bya hundred proofs of the elevation of

20. Ibid. For the materialization of these qualities in Gericault's erotic art, see especially the recently
published Scene d'interieur:Coupleenlace aupres d'unefemme etendue,a small painting formerly in the
collection of Dantan Jeune. Sales Catalogue,Ader Tajan, Paris, Hotel Drouot, Friday,June 26, 1992, no.
48, with a notice by Philippe Grunchec. I am grateful to Robert Simon for having brought this work to
my attention.
58 OCTOBER

his character, the sensitivity, tenderness, and excellence of his heart."21Yet we may
count ourselves lucky, perhaps, that Gericault kept his elevated character and his
tender heart to himself insofar as the representation of women was concerned.
The issue, of course, goes far beyond the psycho-biographical one of a single
artist's feelings or "attitudes" toward women. Gericault the artist produced his
work at a specific moment in the social history of women as well as the history of
representation. Social and cultural historians of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries like Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, Dorinda Outram, and
Chantal Thomas have "made us aware of the peculiarly relentless exclusion of
women from the radical renovation that ought logically to have furthered their
liberation."22To borrow the words of Dorinda Outram, "The same arena which
created public man made woman into fille publique."23 The exclusion of women
from public life that began during the French Revolution continued apace in its
aftermath. In order to constitute a suitable public iconographic context for the
representation of women, Gericault could, like Ingres, have resorted to
Madonnas, Odalisques, and conventional portraits. To none of these practices
would he lend himself. Some kind of representational rapport with women exists,
powerfully but privately in his work, in the form of a fantasied sexual connections
with self-determined women engaging in agons with often incompletely human
male creatures, like centaurs.
It would seem that Gericault gave himself permission to fantasize in private
images what was not possible, even thinkable, in his public ones. By restricting the
representation of the female nude to the realm of the private and by investing his
erotica with such directness and energy, Gericault left himself with no place to go
in terms of public exhibition: hence his strangely reduced, marginal production
of this subject.24
I seem to have arrived at the paradoxical position of asserting that only
those who, in the conventional terms set forth by Clement, are misogynists are
capable of representing women fairly-an odd position for a feminist, but then
again, not really. In their different ways Degas, Seurat, and, finally, Gericault seem
to have made out the most interesting cases for feminine representation in the
nineteenth century-not those apparent admirers and idealizers of them, Ingres

21. Clement, Gericault,p. 219.

22. Peter Brooks, "The Revolutionary Body," in Fictions of the French Revolution, ed. B. Fort
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 39. For specific examples and documentation, see
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture,and Class in theFrenchRevolution(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1984) andJoan B. Landes, Womenand thePublicSpherein theAge of theFrenchRevolution
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988).
23. Dorinda Outram, TheBodyand theFrenchRevolution:Sex, Class, and Political Culture(New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 127.
24. For a quite different, but not necessarily contradictory, Freudian interpretation of these draw-
ings as implicated in Gericault's experience of the Primal Scene, see the talk by Stefan Germer, "'Je
commence une femme et ca devient un lion': Fantasmes erotiques dans l'oeuvre de Gericault,"
presented at the Gericault colloquium at the Louvre, November 1991.
Gericault,or theAbsenceof Women 59

and Renoir. In the nineteenth century, with its increasingly commodified system
of representation of the female body, a body disempowered, objectified, pacified,
or prettified, exaggeratedly sexualized or purified, Gericault's banishment or
marginalization of women, like his representation of other oppressed groups-
the poor or blacks or the insane-assumes the position of a positive intervention
within the dominant discourse. Or one might say that, briefly, living as he did
before the conventional modes of both conservative and vanguard objectification
of women's bodies were definitively put in place, at the very time of what costume
historian J. Flugel has called the "great masculine renunciation," the boundaries
of gender representation were still relatively fluid, more flexible and open to
exploration than they were to become later in the century.25
Gericault was working at the beginning of a long trajectory: the hardening
up and rationalization-through science, through recourse to the realm of the
"natural," through the commodification of visual imagery-of clearly defined
"separate spheres" for the two sexes-in social practice as well as in representa-
tion. Gericault was in fact, to borrow Clement's terms, but with quite different
implications, too refined, too sensitive to indulge in this commodified kind of
representation, or to create a sexualized image of woman at all, it would seem,
except for his private pleasure and that of his close friends. Within the complex
but generally oppressive discursive construction of femininity during the early
years of the nineteenth century, I understand Gericault's removal of women from
his oeuvreas constituting a relatively positive gesture: an absence that is, in fact, a
moving and provocative presence.
No one can escape from ideology, history, or the psychosexual wounds req-
uisite to coming of age in our culture, past or present; yet some few have managed
to make an intervention, no matter how slight, or with what lack of intentionality,
in the seemingly monolithic structure of illusory signs and significations that
construct femininity in the world of representation. Gericault, by removing
women from his representational field in the way he did, and by establishing
feminine presence where he did, was one of those-highly exceptional-interveners
in the dominant discourse of his time.

25. See, for example, Thomas Crow's exploration of new constructions of the male body during
and after the French Revolution in "Revolutionary Activism and the Cult of Male Beauty in the Studio
of David," in Fort, ed., Fictionsof theFrenchRevolution,pp. 55-83.